Russell Martin & Associates

AUGUST 2007 LEARNING FLASH

Russell Martin and Associates Learning Flash August 2007

Starting this month, you will see the Russell Martin & Associates brand as well as the brand of our year-old subsidiary L+EARN, which focuses on improving career colleges. Welcome to our new readers!

We are VERY excited that Vija Dixon has had a scan recently indicating that there is no cancer. Continue to pray for her as she finishes radiation, and pray with gratitude.

This month is the time when we start thinking about the end of summer and the start of school. We become aware of our 2007 goals and start thinking about the work to be done in the fall. Work seems to gear up for a final run. This issue focuses on tips and techniques for Working Smarter including:

Welcome New Friends
Welcome New Facilitators
Congratulations to our Customers
RMA Leadership Academy Retreat 8/28-30 in Indy
How’s Your Succession Plan?
The Pigs Are on the Move
Project Management Contest
NEW: RMA Learn-inars
Hurricane Katrina: They Still Need Help in New Orleans
Project Management for Trainers Certificate Program
Customer Service and LaJolla: What’s Not to Like?
How NOT to do DAMAGE CONTROL Contest
Four Principles for IT Project Success
Real-Life Dilberts
IT Leadership Maturity Checkup: Is Your Organization Strategic?
12 Questions to Determine Employee Engagement
When You Were Conceived
Recruiting Women in IT
Generation Y: What’s Yunique?
Life is to Be Lived
Do Well-Led Teams Make More Mistakes?
These People Vote!
Where’s Lou?

Welcome New Friends

It was exciting to meet many new people this month. Thanks to the IIBA for their invitation to speak at their meeting here in Indy, the Community Hospital IT groups working on their collaboration, the Hormel staff creatively moving into the future, the ITT-Tech Houston West school and the incredible leadership of Cathy Cook, the Coyne American Institute, Herzing College, Westwood College, and the fascinating Orkin University also in Atlanta. I had a great time working with the NNSDO conference sharing Accelerated Learning and Leadership with inspirational nurses in charge of staff development. Welcome all, to our learning community.

Welcome New Facilitators

RMA is excited to announce partnerships with two stellar facilitators in the industry: Audrey Dworek from Indianapolis and Tricia Uhl from Chicago. Both have extensive training and performance consulting background. We are thrilled to have them working with our customers.

Congratulations to our Customers

Kudos to:

· Jay Peterson who has recently taken a new position with Target.

· Beth Mendes who was promoted to National Director of Recruitment, ITT Educational Services.

· Deepti Kehoe who was promoted at Medco.

Anyone else? Just let us know…

RMA Leadership Academy Retreat 8/28-30 in Indy

We are excited to announce that our August leadership academy will be held at the Indianapolis Children’s Museum. This interactive museum is ranked #1 in the country, and will be the perfect place for up and coming leaders to explore their careers. Beside local leaders, this workshop will be joint facilitated by Lou Russell and leadership / coaching expert Susan Mosey. There are only ten seats left! You can hold your spot by registering online. For more information, check out http://www.russellmartin.com/LeadershipAcademy.htm or contact Margie Brown at mbrown@russellmartin.com.

How’s Your Succession Plan?

How would you categorize the leaders you're grooming into your succession plan? Using DISC profiles, we can group leaders into these broad categories:

· The self-made DOMINANCE leader: Achieves success on his own, without help, and—the potential problem—thinks that's how everyone else should do it.

· The perk-and-pray STEADINESS leader: This is the kind of boss who will shell out a chunk of the budget on that hot new seminar hoping for a cure-all to make the team happy.

· The mentor INFLUENCE leader: Climbed the ranks, and leads by talking about his or her special experiences.

· The just-do-it COMPLIANCE leader: Is looking for others to be as perfect as he or she is, and is likely to sneak in and do the work alone.

· The coaching leader – can adapt to all four when appropriate: Is the apparent ideal, coaching others to higher levels of performance and effectiveness.

Would you like your leaders to be effective coaches by learning to balance all four components of the DISC profile? Come to the Leadership Academy public or webinar. Contact Margie at mbrown@russellmartin.com.

Adapted from an article by Daniel Harkavy, author of Becoming a Coaching Leader.

The Pigs Are on the Move

The 10 Steps to Successful Project Management book is being distributed nationally to Borders and Barnes and Noble. See if you can spot it in your local bookstore. If you find it, let us know and you’ll win fabulous pig merchandise. Interested in attending the 10 Steps to Successful Project Management workshop? Contact Margie at mbrown@russellmartin.com. This 1 day workshop (available as a keynote, live or online) will jumpstart your employee’s ability to deliver successful projects. Also, check out the learn-inar scheduled below.

If you’ve read the book, please share your thoughts on the Amazon website. I’d love some testimonials if you have a minute or two.

Project Management Contest

August 25^th is the day that the “The Wizard of OZ” was released in 1939. Explain how a project manager is most like the lion, the scarecrow or the tin man and we will send you a 10 steps to Successful Project Management coloring book and your own box of fresh crayons.

NEW: RMA Learn-inars

10 Steps to Successful Project Management

August 27, 2007 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM ET

Growing Leadership

September 11, 2007 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Teach Less to Learn More

September 20, 2007 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM ET

Hurricane Katrina: They Still Need Help in New Orleans

Covenant House is still in need of additional portable cribs for evacuation during the coming hurricane season. If you don’t have any in the basement you can donate, I found cribs easily on eBay for less than $ 80. Please have them shipped to:

Monica A. Chanel, Human Resources/Development Specialist Covenant House 611 N Rampart St. New Orleans, LA 70112 Telephone: 504-584-1126, Fax: 504-584-1124.

If you donate, let us know and we will reward you with fabulous merchandise!!!

Project Management for Trainers Certificate Program

Join me at the premier offering of this 2 day ASTD program held in Alexandria (DC area), VA. Learn more at http://www.astd.org/astd/Education/project_management_for_trainers_home_page I’d love to see you there. Space is limited. There will be two more offerings this year:

September 24-25, 2007 Dallas, TX

December 10-11, 2007 Chicago, IL

Customer Service and LaJolla: What’s Not to Like?

Join me this month at the Shared Insights / IIR Customer Self Service Conference which truly is a one-of-a-kind event. There's nowhere else where business and IT leaders will come together to get a complete experience that is 100% focused on customer self service. At this conference, like-minded individuals eager to expand their knowledge and gather strategic business ideas will collaborate in an informal setting where education and networking are the sole objectives. I will be giving a closing keynote and for the first time, I will be facilitating a post-conference workshop for attendees to map their lessons learned from the conference to actual Action Plans. Register at http://www.iirusa.com/css/eventhome/30603.xml .

How NOT to do DAMAGE CONTROL Contest

Speaking of customer service…..here’s an email sent to me after our www.lplusearn.com career college website was down. Send us your opinions about why this is not the best way to react to a customer issue, and you’ll win fabulous merchandise.

Dear Mary,

As you may be aware, XXXX.com's web site, email and hosting services were offline for about 16 hours on Tuesday July 24th, and for a little less than 25 minutes yesterday (the 26th). I'm writing to you today to provide you with information about what happened, and what actions we have taken to prevent this kind of occurrence from happening again.

On Tuesday as soon as we discovered there was a problem at our data centre, we were at our data centre investigating the failure. Our new facility uses an EtherDrive (RAID Serial ATA over Ethernet) for storage, and a backplane board in this unit shorted out. This is an exceptionally rare kind of failure, the first one ever for this device. While the front end servers and all drives in our network are redundant to the point where we can have a failure with zero downtime, this board in the EtherDrive was a single point of failure. We maintain spares for all components in this unit, and needed to replace this backplane board as well as the mother board on the unit. Repairs were completed and all services were restored by 4:00 pm on Tuesday. We have now installed a second EtherDrive unit to act as a hot standby for the primary unit. If ever there were a failure of this type, a second unit is available to go live.

For those customers who have been with XXX since our early days, you'll know that we have had an excellent uptime record, and on the rare occurance when problems have occurred, our staff has been very quick to respond and restore service. With our move to the new data centre and investment into new hardware improved architecture, we do anticipate an even better uptime record.

Yours Truly,

Doug Friend (Lou’s note: apparently his REAL name)

President, XXX.com.

By the way, if someone in your office might think this was the right way to approach downtime, contact Margie at mbrown@russellmartin.com about our Effective Writing or Effective Communication 1 day workshops.

Four Principles for IT Project Success

First Principle

IT projects are not about IT, but about people using information and IT to execute business tasks and processes. Most IT projects affect the way people use information and IT in the workplace so there are really no “IT projects” that do not involve changing the way people work.

Second Principle

Measure and determine the business area’s level of effectiveness in information, people and IT practices BEFORE approving a project’s ROI, plan and budget in the business/IT governance process. Many IT-enabled business projects should not be deployed since the climate among potential users of the information and IT is neither effective nor ready to leverage the new tools and applications.

Third Principle

Include information and IT usage in every IT-enabled project: before, during and after deployment.

Fourth Principle

Include information and IT usage as a key business success factor to drive IT enabled business projects. A particular sign of our managerial fascination and perhaps collective ignorance around IT, is that IT projects are seldom if ever evaluated based on the usage of the IT and information by people in the company to achieve business results.

Did you know that we have PMPs ready to do a fast, effective virtual project audit for your troubled projects? Contact Margie Brown at mbrown@russellmartin.com for more details.

From the article “Designed to Fail: Why IT-Enabled Business Projects Underachieve” by Donald A. Marchand, IMD Professor of Strategy and Information Management and Amy Hykes, IMD Research Associate www.imd.ch

Real-Life Dilberts

Quotes by real managers (I did not include the company names, but they were funny):

1. "As of tomorrow, employees will only be able to access the building using individual security cards. Pictures will be taken next Wednesday and employees will receive their cards in 2 weeks."

2. "What I need is a list of specific ‘unknown’ problems we will encounter."

3. "E-mail is not to be used to pass on information or data. It should be used only for company business."

4. "This project is so important, we can’t let things that are more important interfere with it."

5. "Doing it right is no excuse for not meeting the schedule."

6. "No one will believe you solved this problem in one day! We've been working on it for months. Now, go act busy for a few weeks and I'll let you now when it's time to tell them."

7. Quote from the Boss: "Teamwork is a lot of people doing what I say."

8. "We know that communication is a problem, but the company is not going to discuss it with the employees."

9. We recently received a memo from senior management saying: "This is to inform you that a memo will be issued today regarding the memo mentioned above."

10. One day my Boss asked me to submit a status report to him concerning a project I was working on. I asked him if tomorrow would be soon enough. He said, "If I wanted it tomorrow, I would have waited until tomorrow to ask for it!"

IT Leadership Maturity Checkup: Is Your Organization Strategic?

Or is it still…

Focused on cost without tracking the impact on revenue or market share. Firms have done a great job of focusing IT organizations on cost as a measure. But imagine a firm that only measured the cost of the sales organization without its impact on revenue.
Justifying investment funding without measuring projects’ actual impact. IT organizations clearly understand the need for a standard business case to justify projects. But the lack of post-project results audits keeps IT in the dark when it comes to justifying the next project — and lets the business off the hook of owning forecasted change.
Driving new development without earmarking funds for innovation. It is worrisome if they don’t have a separate bucket to fund research and experiment with new technologies.

Did you know that RMA has training to help your teams understand the financial impact of their projects? Contact Margie Brown at mbrown@russellmartin.com.

From an article by Bobby Cameron, Forrester Research

12 Questions to Determine Employee Engagement

The Gallup Organization has identified 12 questions to ask to determine if the level of employee engagement is where it should be. The more yes answers, the greater their level of engagement.

Do you know what is expected of you at work?
Do you have the materials and equipment you need to do your work right?
At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?
In the last seven days, have you received recognition or praise for doing good work?
Does your supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about you as a person?
Is there someone at work who encourages your development?
At work, do your opinions seem to count?
Does the mission or purpose of your company make you feel your job is important?
Are your associates or fellow employees committed to doing quality work?
Do you have a best friend at work?
In the last six months, has someone at work talked to you about your progress?
This last year, have you had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

RMA has a new survey called Clarity to assess employee engagement. This unique survey asks about the emotion of the employee before asking for the emotion cause, which provides a more accurate picture of perceptions. Intrigued? Contact Margie Brown, mbrown@russellmartin.com.

Excerpted from Motivation Strategies, Spring 2007

When You Were Conceived

Birthday Calculator

As my friends from high school lob 50^th birthday joke-gifts at each other, check out this great link. You can even tell what the moon looked like the night you were born.

Recruiting Women in IT

Recruiters striving to hire women for information technology positions have to go beyond the typical sales pitch emphasizing job promotion and security to get results, according to a Penn State research study of 92 female IT practitioners. Women represent 60 percent of the workforce, but they account for only a little more than 32 percent of the IT workforce. While about 30 percent of respondents indicate they value careers that afford them opportunities to perfect skills in technical areas, others say they want careers with managerial opportunities.

Generation Y: What’s Yunique?

Global manufacturers are forgetting a growing segment of their workforce—Generation Y. That's the conclusion of "Managing the Talent Crisis in Global Manufacturing: Strategies to Attract and Engage Generation Y," the latest industry report from Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu. By 2025, Generation Y, defined by Deloitte as those born between 1982 and 1993, and younger generations will comprise 40 to 60 percent of the global workforce. The report offers some points to keep in mind:

• Gen Yers overall have a negative image of manufacturing. What Gen Y doesn't know is that, contrary to common perception, the job of a modern manufacturing worker requires strong technology, flexibility, multitasking, and team problem-solving skills.
• Consider how to effectively give Gen Yers what they most value on the job, the report recommends. That includes long-term career development and multiple experiences within a single organization, availability and access to mentors across the company, work-life flexibility, a tech-savvy work environment, and open social networks that facilitate communication.

Life is to Be Lived

Thanks to Mike Hannigan for this enchanting story about violinist Fritz Kreisler. He once came across a beautiful instrument he wanted to acquire. When he finally raised the money for the violin, he returned to buy it and learned that it had already been sold to a collector. He went to the new owner's home in order to try to persuade him to sell the violin. But the collector said it was one of his prized possessions and he could not let it go. The disappointed Kreisler turned to leave, but then asked a favor. "May I play the instrument once more before it is consigned to silence?"

Permission was granted and the great musician began to play. The violin sang out a quality of music so beautiful that the collector himself could only listen in wonderment. "I have no right to keep that to myself," he said after the musician finished. "The violin is yours, Mr. Kreisler. Take it into the world, and let people hear it."

You and I are exquisite violins -- our music is meant to be heard.

Do Well-Led Teams Make More Mistakes?

While studying teamwork, Harvard professor Amy Edmondson found a paradox: Well-led teams appeared to make more mistakes than average teams. As it turned out, good teams, which value communication, report more errors. A climate of openness could make it easier to report and discuss errors compared to teams with poor relationship or with punitive leaders. The good teams don’t make more mistakes, they report more.

Need help building a more cohesive team? Contact Margie at mbrown@russellmartin.com.

Find the article at http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5588.html

These People Vote!

Please be sure to vote to counteract there votes!!

We had to have the garage door repaired. We were told by the repairman that we did not have a "large" enough motor on the opener. I thought for a minute, and said that we had the largest one made at that time, a 1/2 horsepower. He shook his head and said, "Lady, you need a 1/4 horsepower." I responded that 1/2 was larger than 1/4. He said, "NO, it's not." Four is larger than two."
I live in a semi rural area. We recently had a new neighbor call the local township administrative office to request the removal of the DEER CROSSING sign on our road. The reason: "Too many deer are being hit by cars out here! I don't think this is a good place for them to be crossing anymore."
My daughter ordered a taco. She asked the person behind the counter for "minimal lettuce." He said he was sorry, but they only had iceberg lettuce.
The stoplight on the corner buzzes when it’s safe to cross the street. A friend asked if I knew what the buzzer was for. I explained that it signals blind people when the light is red. Appalled, she responded, "What on earth are blind people doing driving?!"

Where’s Lou?

This month, Lou will be in Chicago, Louisville, Alexandria (VA), La Jolla (CA) and of course…

Indianapolis. Give Lou a shout if you’d like to grab a latte!

Lou Russell

President/CEO